As is well known, nowadays semiconductor components or chips are efficiently produced on discoid plates, called wafers, which are sliced off of bar-shaped silicon monocrystals. Various technologies, such as photolithography, epitaxy, diffusion, masking methods and the like are used to form a plurality of similar integrated circuits on such a plate. After being separated into single chip crystals, they can no longer be differentiated from one another. If clusters of defects in the circuits occur later, it can no longer be determined afterwards whether these are statistically distributed defects or if they are defects that have accumulated in certain regions of the plates. It would be quite advantageous if, in searching for the cause of the defects, one were still able to discover later on the original position of the particular chip on the plate.